Replacing Optical Drive With 2nd Hard Drive

[MondeoMan1981]

Picked up a cheap Dell E5440 and looking for recommendations for a caddy to replace my optical drive.

Thinking of going SSD for speed considerations - main drive is currently an SSD also.

Assuming the drive will just appear in windows (10) and need formatting ?

[eltawater]

Pop the optical drive out first and measure the thickness of it. I've got a dell 6320 and went through two caddies to find the correct one.

The drive shows up in disk management needing to be partitioned and then formatted as normal.

As it's a sata connection it'll be faster than your usb2 drives anyway so it's up to you whether you prioritise a higher capacity spinning disk over an ssd. Mine is desk bound in a dock so battery savings and heat weren't a concern so in went the platters.

[AlexC1981]

Have you considered fitting an mSATA drive? I believe your laptop would have a slot for one.

[annodomini2]

Yes, you can pick caddies up on eBay for £5-10

[snuffy]

I fitted one to my Levono a few months ago:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00C94G7Q6/ref...

It's a doddle; eject the CD drive, turn the laptop off. Undo one screw and then pull the CD drive out. Pop the SSD in the caddy, push it it and do the screw up. And the plastic front bit off the CD drive pops off and clips on the caddy, so it all looks like the same when installed. Simples.